was already night; here and there, scarcely visible in the distance, a light glimmered from afar--a star of earth. Now they were going to rest, her weary companions down yonder. With them all was well; a friendly roof was above their heads; they rested securely in the bosom of a sheltered home--perhaps, already half-asleep, they still listened behind the coloured curtain of the little window to the beloved one's song--only she was alone, thrust forth and banished, exposed defenceless to every terror, her only shelter the inhospitable hut, where the wind whistled through the empty window-slits. "Father, father, how could thou have the heart to do it?" she cried aloud, but near and far nothing answered but the rush of the night-wind. Higher and higher rose the moon, the streaks of light in the west lost their gold, and glimmered only a pale yellow in the darkness of the evening sky. The outlines of the mountains seemed to shift and grow larger in the twilight; threatening, overpowering, her nearest neighbour, the mighty Similaun, looked down upon her. All the giant peaks around seemed to stare at her frowningly, because she had dared to spy out their nightly aspect. It was as though only since Wally's arrival, they had all become so still and quiet--as a company that confers of private affairs is suddenly dumb when a stranger enters. There she stood, the helpless human form, so lonely in the midst of this silent, motionless world of ice, so inaccessibly high above all living things, so strange in the weird company of clouds and glaciers, in the terrible, mysterious silence. "Now art thou all alone in the world!" cried an inner voice, and an unspeakable anguish, the anguish of the forsaken ones, swept over her. It seemed to her all at once as though she were doomed to go on, for ever lost, through vast immeasurable space, and as though seeking help she clung to the steep wall of rock, pressing her wildly-beating heart against the cold stone. What passed within her in that hour, she herself did not know, but it seemed as though the stone against which she pressed her young, warm, trembling heart, had exercised some mysterious power over her, for that hour left her hard and rough as if she had been in very truth Murzoll's child. CHAPTER V. Old Luckard. When about a week later the herdsman came up the mountain with the flocks, Wally almost frightened him, she looked so wasted away; but when he said to her, "Thy father bids me ask thee if thou'st had enough of being up here, and if thou'll do thy duty?"--she set her teeth and answered, "Tell my father, I'd sooner let myself be eaten piecemeal by the vultures, than do anything to please them that drove me up here!" This was for the present the last message that passed between her and her father.